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Caminito
del Rey, Malaga by Luis Machuca Santa-Cruz
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This text is the introduction to the catalog of the XIII Biennial of Spanish Architecture and Urbanism, first presented in Granada in June 2016 and currently traveling to New York, France, Germany, Japan and Sweden
When compared to past editions, the
panorama offered by the winning entries of this XIII Biennial of Spanish
Architecture and Urbanism is indeed post-apocalyptic. The
"apocalypse" referred to is, of course, the crisis that has halted
construction and devastated the profession, and that has left architecture
under question in the eyes of the larger public for the part it has played in
the excesses preceding the collapse. And now, amid the rubble, along comes the
XIII Biennial: a handful of small-town private houses, a
"pre-restored" convent in Seville, a community garden in Santiago, a
nature path in Malaga.... Are these and other winning proposals the tender
shoots that will restore the profession to life? Do they offer the outlines of
a renewed architectural praxis and vision that can grow and mature, informing
larger and more ambitious endeavors, and renovating the confidence and standing
of the profession in the public eye? Or will the hard-won lessons of the crisis
be swept aside when business-as-usual resumes? (If indeed business resumes at
all any time soon.) What will post-crisis Spanish society demand of its
architects: will it be EuroVegas or community gardens and participatory
planning?
Though
covering recently-finished work, the 22 winning projects span the period of
crisis in their origins,
with those initiated before it began standing out in size and budget: the
Madrid Rio Park and the Museum of the Royal Collections, both in Madrid, the
Gran Canaria Arena in Las Palmas and, most ironically for the profession, the
Granada School of Architecture, whose construction documents were finished in
June 2008, just before architecture became a heroic career choice. Of the rest,
eleven cost less than one million euros to build, and three less than 100,000. The
contrast between the scope and budget of Madrid Rio, involving 3,000 hectares
and 250 million euros in brute construction costs, and the reconstruction of a
ruined house in the village of Cilleros, in Cárceres, for 66,000 euros, could
not be more eloquent.
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Casa
Luz, Cilleros (Cárceres), by Arquitrectura-G
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Despite these obvious differences in scale
and timing, the 22 projects have many points in common, falling as a whole into
two rather opposing categories, depending on whether they were developed for
sites offering rich urban or natural conditions, or on the tabula rosa of new
urban developments and parcels.
In the first category, designs are
conceived almost exclusively in contextual terms. New interventions are laid
over a palimpsest of pre-existing conditions, mixing existing constructions and
ruins, vegetation, topographic accident and urban ramifications. These designs
seek different degrees of balance between geometric irregularity and complexity on the one hand, derived from
their deeply-layered sites and the topography of their natural settings, and
the demands of clarity and order. They are conceived in historic time,
presenting new construction as contemporary rather than mimetic, as a new and
not necessarily conclusive addition in
an ongoing build-up of archeological layers.
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| Gardens of
the Santa María de los Reyes Convent in Seville by MGM Morales de Giles Arquitectos |
Examples include the Caramoniña community
gardens in Santiago de Compostela, inserted over a highly-irregular plot and
negotiating a 20-meter slope, or the restored cliff-hanging walkway of the
Caminito del Rey in Malaga, built over the preserved ruins of the original and
following its zigzagging course through a gorge. The rehabilitated gardens of
the Santa María de los Reyes convent in Seville offer a curious inversion of
the tension between natural accident and imposed order, with the architects
inserting zigzagging lines of raised borders to order circulation and
activities in the open but irregular spaces, citing as their inspiration
Michael Heizer's landart "Rift" of 1968.
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New
elevator access to historic cventer of Gironella (Barcelona) by Carles Enrich
Giménez
Photo © Adrià Goulanuevo
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The elevator that connects the raised and
fortified historic center of Gironella (Barcelona) with newer districts below is
a discrete yet transformative intervention in an existing environment, detailed
and sited so as to both complement and contrast with existing retaining walls
and towers. The discrete addition to a restored masía located in a natural park
in Sant Joan les Fonts (Girona) employs a similar strategy in a more immediate
scale of reference.
Other projects organize complexes of
accrued pre-existing buildings, with judiciously-scaled contemporary additions,
as in the Property Registry in Vigo and the Granada School of Architecture,
which occupies a former Military Hospital with elements dating back 500
years.
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| Architecture
School, Granada by Víctor López Cotelo |
In the interior spaces of the Santa María
convent in Seville, previously mentioned, the strategy with respect to the
existing buildings is quite different. Responding to budget restraints and
following Rem Koolhaas' 2005 proposal for the Hermitage, the architects simply
consolidated the semi-ruined rooms, leaving them in a rough,
"pre-rehabilitated" state so as to promote "reflection" on
"the relation of time and material fragility" – very post-apocalyptic
indeed.
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| Santa María de los Reyes Convent. Interior |
A pair of new buildings in consolidated historic
areas are responsive to context in a more diffuse manner, follows local cues in terms of window
openings or finishes, as in the Chao House in Corcubión (A Coruña) and a
subsidized housing project in the center of Pamplona.
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Left: Casa Chao, Corcubión (A Coruña), by Creus & Carrasco Architects
Right: Social housing, Pamplona, by Pereda Pérez Architects
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In this same category of contingent
design, two private house projects use the ruinous state of previous
constructions on their sites to open the domestic sphere more fully to the
outdoors: the house in Cilleros, already mentioned, with its large patio, and
the 1014 House in Granollers, where the architects pull the interior spaces
back from the existing street facades on either end of the narrow site to
create courtyard gardens. In the "Scaffold House" (Casa Andamio) on a
beach in Begur (Girona), the architects organize and edit an accumulation of
additions, and add a new layer to the whole in the form of woven façade screens
that support climbing vegetation, transforming the relation of the house to the
nearby beach and introducing a system of passive climate control.
In the opposing camp of work conceived in
the absence of a highly-determining context, winning designs are generally more
direct, severe, and minimalist, tending towards that apparently rational and
yet poetic ideal of
"the cube that works", as Alejandro de la Sota called it in his
monograph, citing Le Corbusier.
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| Arena, Las Palmas de Gran
Canaria, by Eduardo Pérez Gómez & Miguel Ángel Sánchez García |
The monolithic concrete shell of the Gran
Canaria Arena is the clearest example of this approach, with its entry portal
spanning 90 meters, its grandly-scaled ambulatory inside, under the slope of
the grandstands, and the minimalist deformation of its roof to place the
building in relation to the most general and distant attributes of its setting:
the mountains to the west, the city to the east, and the horizon line of the
ocean.
Equally severe in its use of opaque forms
–in this case, a galvanized steel cladding– is a factory for electrical
equipment in Don Benito (Extremadura), though here the architect organizes the naves
and offices around a central service patio to create a self-referential urban
setting. Sections of the naves alternate in height and width, and are
orchestrated, together with openings and movement, to create a
carefully-controlled spatial ensemble.
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| Electrical
equipment factory, Don Benito, by José María Sánchez García |
A project for 163 subsidized housing units
in the Ensanche of Vallecasin Madrid takes the same approach of varied massing
around a central court. The architects use a system of regular floor-to-ceiling
louvers to reduce the formal play of window openings and emphasize instead the
volumetric massing. In the conversion of the multi-story Auzo Factory, located
in the Bilbao district of Matiko, into a center for start-ups, the architects
transform the facade to similar effect, using continuous glazing covered with
louvers, although here the composition works as a plane rather than in
volumetric terms.
In smaller-scale projects, architects
often combine forceful massing with more specific contextual references. The
massing and large-span entry opening of the Fronton in Orkoien
(Navarra) can be compared to those of the Gran Canaria Arena, but its use
of wood (together with exposed concrete) and its sloping roofs echo surrounding
houses and evoke a local rural vernacular. In the case of the "House of
the Winds" in La Linea de la
Concepción (Cádiz), the architects shape the volume to protect terraces from
prevailing winds, creating a sheltering, shell-like, rather tensile form, with
opening gathered and protected under it.
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Left: Sailing School, Sotogrande (Cádiz), by Héctor Fernández
Elorza & Carlos García Fernández
Right: Frontón, Orkoien (Navarra), by OFS Architects
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As seen in the factory in Don Benito, some
projects develop a small-scale urban setting of their own in the absence of a
strong local context. The two small enclosures of the Sailing School in
Sotogrande (Cádiz), for example, are as simple and unadorned as a
"chiringuito" or beach shack, but the architects have added an open
court between them and a shading loggia facing the beach, which functions as a
faux-monumental facade and circulation gallery.
The Biennial winners include one work
realized abroad, the Gösta Pavilion of the Serlachius Museum in Mänttä,
Finland, in which the monolithic, inflected linear building houses an interior
"recorrido" or "promenade architecturale" that is deformed
by deep angled cuts on either side of the volume, creating the kind of
irregular, angled, trajectory seen in the Camino del Rey or in the zigzagging
raised borders of the Santa María gardens. This strategy of the
"recorrido" developed with seemingly arbitrary twists and incidents
points us towards the vast Madrid Rio project as well, where the linear but
otherwise undetermined site along the course of the river invites a similar
weave of circulation paths (though more fluid in form and developed over slopes
and hills), mixed with vegetation and spaces for recreational and other
activities. While the miniature urban settings of Don Benito or Sotogrande are
open-ended and fragmentary, here the architects respond to the programmatic
demands of a museum and a park with routes that, while non-orthogonal, are more
highly-determined.
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Gösta
Pavilion, Serlachius Museum, Mänttä, Finland, by Mara Partida, Héctor Mendoza
& Boris Bezan
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I have left the Royal Collections for the
end of this review because it is a work that spans both categories of classification
I propose. On the one hand, it is built on a highly sensitive site, which
implicates the "cornice" or bluff crowned by Madrid's Royal Palace
and Cathedral. The building is sited below this cornice, as if forming part of
its retaining walls, and the staggered massing mirrors that of the palace and
its wing. But on the other hand, the monumentally-scaled, elongated volumes of
the galleries, with their dense facade screens, are as blunt and austere in
their own right as the factory volumes in Don Benito. While the architects
eloquently describe the project as "a new text written over the already
written, a reflection on history and memory," they also compare it to a
large civil engineering work, "giving the construction a pragmatic realism
that avoids unnecessary formal exaggerations."
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Museum of the Royal Collections, Madrid, by Luis Moreno
Mansilla y Emilio Tuñón
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The Royal Collections offers a good
summary of the contradictory impulses found among the winning entries: the
battle between a striving for subtlety and complexity in the response to issues
of context on the one hand, and the demand for formal contention and directness
on the other. In a project such as the Gran Canaria Arena, the architects must
elaborate their design without the cover of a good contextual back-story. They have
little to start with: an empty site, a program and a budget. Everything else is
up to them. In this scenario, winning projects return to the rationalist, as
opposed to organicist, tradition in Spanish architecture, a notable change from
just a few years ago. In the neo-organicist projects of the years before the
crisis, like other formal experimentation of the period, architects explored
the potential of geometrically complex, self-generated formal systems. Now,
like De La Sota, they camouflage aesthetic ambition in stories of function and
structural logic. But much has changed since De la Sota's time, and we can also
see the impact of minimalism in these works, with their striving for a uniform exterior skin,
their sense for material, craft and texture, and their assertive, sculptural
solidity.
Function and structural logic also guide
many of the interventions in more contextually-conditioned projects, from the
Royal Collections to the Architecture School in Granada, the elevator in
Gironella and the masía in Sant Joan les Fonts. In these cases, the architects
take a position of discretion and respect for the surroundings without
renouncing the formal integrity of their interventions. But architects can also
find in the weave of pre-existing conditions on a site the "back
story" that justifies a greater freedom of formal composition, as in the Santa
María convent or the Civil Registry in Vigo. And other projects, like the
museum in Finland and Madrid Rio, go further, assuming an artificial naturalism
– more angular and Constructivist in the first case, and more picturesque in
the second, recalling Frederick Law Olmstead and Capability Brown.
To conclude, I'd like to set aside the
projects begun before the crisis and consider only the smaller-scale works
initiated in these years of hardship. What does the new, "post-apocalyptic
panorama" of current architectural practice actually look like? It would
seem to be a time for fine-tuning the country's built patrimony, fixing up
neglected corners of towns and cities, recycling and re-purposing what's already
there rather than pulling things down and starting over. In this situation,
questions of sustainability and passive climate control fit right in, as do
projects involving wider public participation. Has the crisis initiated a
long-term period of scarcity, like that of the pre-industrial economy preceding
the 1960's, a return to the eternal Spain of abundance for the few and want for
the many? Has Spain become a country of declining expectations, like Portugal
perhaps, where relics of a glorious past are the second-hand clothes that new
generations learn to adapt for the present with as much dignity and
resourcefulness as they can? Though this
does seem unlikely in the long run. Amid these reflections, I remember my
grandmother, a survivor of two world wars and the German inflation who, despite
her mink coats and trans-Atlantic holidays, saved pieces of used string and
empty mayonnaise jars. Maybe that wasn't such a silly idea after all.
The rest of the winning projects mentioned in the text:
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Casa
Andamio, Begur (Girona), by Ramon Bosch & Elisabet Capdeferro Pla
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| Community gardens in Caramoniña, Santiago de
Compostela, by Elizabeth Abalo & Gonzalo Alonso |
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| House
of the Winds, La Linea de la Concepción (Cádiz), by José Luis Muñoz |
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| Masía "Can Calau", Sant Joan les Fonts (Girona),
by Montserrat Nogués i Teixidor |
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| 163 units of subsidize housing, Vallecas (Madrid), by Rafael,
Pablo & Alfonso Olalquiaga |
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Property
Registry, Vigo, by Jesús Irisarri & Guadalupe Piñera
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Madrid
Río, by Burgos
& Garrido; Porras - La Casta; Rubio & Álvarez-Sala & West 8 (Holland)
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| Casa
1014, Granollers (Barcelona), by H Arquitectes |
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| Auzo
Factory, Bilbao, by Asier Santas Torres & Luis Suárez Mansilla |
Saving the
Furniture
Introductory essay
Begoña Díaz-Urgorri, Camen Moreno & Juan Domingo Santos,
Co-Directors
Catalog, XIII Bienal Española de Arquitecutra y Urbanismo
2016
Fundación Arquia, Barcelona, 2016, pages 26 - 31
Complete coverage on all the entries:
